Damaged
by algyy
Summary: "It had all made her the witch she was, of course: powerful, disciplined, dignified - and broken." An attempted heart-to-heart by Miss Cackle leads to Constance Hardbroom reflecting back over the events of her life.


_Trigger Warning: Discussion of eating disorders and emotional abuse._

"It worries me, Constance."

They were words which Amelia Cackle said fairly often to her deputy head. Occasionally she said them in relation to the school or its pupils, and that, Constance felt, was reasonable enough. In fact, if anything, she wished Amelia would worry more about the school and its pupils; though of course extremely caring, her attitude could be rather laissez-faire, and her benevolent murmurs of "Girls will be girls" and "It will all sort out" could seem rather ineffectual at times. Surely, Constance thought, the antics of Mildred Hubble alone demanded more than the intermittent gentle concern Amelia gave to them. They certainly kept Constance awake at night often enough. Not that she was the world's best sleeper anyway.

Far more often, the cause of Amelia's worry was Constance herself, and that Constance objected to, quite strenuously. She did not need or want anyone to worry about her. Her life was no cause for concern and quite frankly none of Amelia's business. But every so often Amelia would beckon her deputy head into her office for a private chat, and out it would come, that well-worn phrase: "It worries me, Constance." The reasons for this worry varied. Sometimes it was "You work too hard." Sometimes it was "You don't sleep enough." "You seem angry." "You seem unhappy." "You spend so much time alone."

Today it was "You don't eat enough." As if that was some great revelation. As if no one had ever pointed it out before. Constance just about refrained from rolling her eyes and saying "Oh, puh-lease" like an angsty third-year.

"My food intake is quite adequate, thank you, headmistress," she said, crisply, instead, and was pleased to note that her voice held no trace of panic, "I am quite fit and well. Your concern is appreciated, but really quite unnecessary." Panic made her overdo it and she added inanely, "I ate a banana this morning."

"We never seem to see you at mealtimes," pursued the headmistress.

"I prefer to eat alone. Besides, someone has to supervise the girls in the dining-hall. Miss Cackle, there really is no cause for concern. I am in excellent health. I have plenty of energy." Better not to mention that most of her energy came in a bottle marked "Wide-Awake Potion". "I continue to take that vitamin concoction you insisted on several years ago."

"Ah, yes, that would be after you passed out at the Interschool Broomstick Championships."

"I did not _pass out_. I simply became a little light-headed. The day was very hot. Phyllis Pentangle completely overreacted by waving that burning owl feather under my nose."

Miss Cackle let this slide and tried a different tack. "You see, Constance, you must think of the girls. They are at an impressionable age, and many of them look up to you. Hearing you express your views on cake..."

"...has done nothing to deter them from sneaking out to Cosie's Tearooms at every possible opportunity. I don't think you need to worry about that, Headmistress."

"You seem to regard food as an enemy, Constance."

"As opposed to what? A bosom friend? Not everyone lives for cream and cheese, Miss Cackle."

The remark was unnecessarily pointed, and she regretted it as soon as she had said it.

"There is nothing wrong with a healthy appreciation for good food," said Amelia, sternly (though where her obsession with cheesecake came into that was anyone's guess), "You're a successful, attractive young woman, Constance; the last thing you need is to be continually dieting."

Amelia was very nearly turned into a frog on the spot, though she didn't know it. There were times when it was best for Constance not to be around people, especially those whom she usually quite liked and thought should remain people-shaped. Her fingers were trembling (and sparking slightly) as she folded her arms; Amelia said something else, but she was already dematerialising and didn't hear.

Continually dieting! Was that what they thought of her? That she, of all people, was obsessed with calorie-counting and body image? Materialising in a quiet spot in the forest (one she came to quite often), she took deep steadying breaths, and also raised her hand and blasted a nearby tree trunk to smithereens. Neither action particularly calmed her.

Dieting! It was an insult, she thought, aware that she was being quite irrational but not caring just for the moment. Did they think she was vain?

A trim figure and a good posture on a broomstick were desirable, of course, but Constance had been raised to look on external appearance as entirely secondary to intelligence. Secondary? It was inferior, vastly, vastly inferior. That had been her mother's belief, and it had influenced her, of course it had. To Alice Hardbroom, one of the greatest minds in witchcraft of her generation, the body had been a prison for the mind, a useless carcass that the pure spirit of genius was forced to drag behind it. Bodily functions repelled her; she had been terrible with childhood illnesses. Constance sometimes wondered how she had ever survived pregnancy; wondered if perhaps it hadn't been planned, if perhaps her mother had thought _oh no_ when she realised. It was sobering to think that the first person to discover your existence might have been horrified by it.

Alice had been disdainful of food, too busy for it. She ate enough to live, that was all, just enough to be able to think and plan and study, just enough that the body would not impede the mind with its base clamourings for sustenance. Constance's father had been different, in many ways. He was warmer as a person, less aloof. He liked a good meal, a drink or two, a lazy afternoon in a chair in the library, reading and snacking and dropping crumbs in his spell-books.

Goodness only knew how two such different people had ever come to even have a conversation, let alone pursue a relationship and get married. It had clearly been a terrible mistake, as they had divorced when Constance was nine. She remembered her father breaking the news to her; he had tried to soften the blow by prefixing it with a trip to a local fairground. He had been indulgent even by his standards that day; she should really have been made suspicious by it. Maybe she had been; she didn't really remember. But nothing Constance wanted had been too much trouble for him that day, nothing had been too expensive or too time-consuming. She had had seven turns on the Hook-a-Duck. He had bombarded the coconut shy until he won her a gigantic dopey-eyed stuffed rabbit. He had ridden on the Dodgems with her, and nearly hexed a couple of teenage boys whom he felt had slammed into them rather too roughly and might have hurt her. And he had veritably showered her with food, all the cheap sweet foods she liked and never got at home: a big sugary cloud of candyfloss, a strawberry ice-cream with sprinkles and a flake, a hot chocolate in a café on the way home. It was then that he had told her, sitting there over their drinks with the vast dopey-eyed rabbit commandeering a whole chair of its own. To nine-year-old Constance, the stability of her parents' marriage was a thing as obvious and necessary and as little thought of as gravity; it was just how things were. When it was so suddenly snatched away, it was as if there was nothing left to anchor her. She had choked on her hot chocolate, and never forgot how the acid had risen and burnt her throat.

He had made all the reassurances that were no doubt usual in such circumstances: it wasn't her fault (why would he say that, she had wondered, if he hadn't thought it was, really? Had she driven him away?), he still loved her, he would see her often. Of course she would stay with her mother, that was taken for granted. A young girl needs to be with her mother.

He had come to visit, quite frequently at first. Alice did not make it easy for him, and his visits grew less frequent. Constance herself was not always pleased to see him; something in him made her feel awkward and irrationally angry, and she would set out resolving to have a nice time and be the happy daughter he loved only to end up becoming annoyed and snapping or sulking, spoiling everything. She had driven him away, she was sure of it, and some impulse that wasn't her own made her keep pushing him even further.

The choking feeling she had felt when drinking that hot chocolate had never really gone away, somehow, and she had never regained her taste for sweet things.

Beginning boarding school had been almost a relief. The Oakbeam Witchcraft Academy was a pleasant school, not overly strict, set in a rambling old castle that was also home to several branches of magical government. Constance had made a few acquaintances, but did not seek friendship; she had been bullied a little for being quiet and intelligent, but strove not to let it bother her. At lunchtimes she picked what she felt she could eat from the selection in the canteen: the food was rather better than at most boarding schools, since the kitchens also had to cater for various government officials; Constance took bland, savoury foods that were easy to carry in a napkin, and left the canteen as quickly as possible, seeking places to eat that were quiet and free of people. There was an old staircase that no one was supposed to use that was her lunch spot for several terms; she would slip under the rope that was supposed to stop people using it (she hadn't always been so fond of rules as she was now) and retreat to a spot halfway up, invisible from the corridor. She usually read while she ate. It didn't matter how small her bites were, how long it took to chew; no one could see her. Sometimes she remembered with pain the few first days of term when she had eaten in the canteen, grudgingly allowed to sit with a few people from her Spells class, surrounded by hubbub, her bites smaller and smaller until someone asked, "Are you even actually eating that?". They had all finished and gone outside; she had not been invited, and been left with half a plate of food that she couldn't seem to force down. One of the serving staff had lectured her about waste when she tipped it into the bin.

But here on the stairs that didn't matter. She could take all lunchtime to slowly nibble through an apple if she wanted.

And of course she had studied at school. How she had studied! She loved magic and she loved to learn; she always had and probably always would. She was the ideal student, top of the class. Her only flaws were that she never volunteered answers in class and that she was sometimes bored and slapdash with the more elementary lessons. She performed well in exams and strove to do even better: because here, after all, was something she could excel at, something that even her mother approved of. It was strange, she thought, in later years, how her father had been the one who had demonstrably loved her, but her mother had been the one she most wanted to impress.

In her third year, she left the stairs and spent her lunchtimes in the Potions laboratory, where she conducted strange but engrossing experiments and occasionally blew up cauldrons. She still had her notebook from that year, a messy, stained exercise book, full of ideas scribbled down at all angles and loose bits of paper shoved in any old how. Her mind had been on fire with plans and experiments and dreams: chaotic, perhaps, but also approaching something like happiness.

All that changed, of course, when she took the scholarship to Witch Training College. She hadn't really wanted to; she had liked the school where she was, looked forward to completing her Witch's Higher Certificate there, maybe staying on to the sixth form. But her mother had suggested she apply for the WTC scholarship, saying it was "a wonderful opportunity", and she had still craved her mother's approval. She really thought her mother had been truly, properly proud of her that year when she went home for Christmas and told her she had been chosen to be tutored personally by Mistress Heckitty Broomhead. The name was an important one in witchcraft education; Mistress Broomhead had trained some of the most successful witches of the age. Alice Hardbroom had actually smiled at the news; Constance imagined her looking back over the horrors of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood and deciding that it had been almost worth it to see a child of hers succeed so spectacularly.

Of course, on reflection, WTC and the tutelage of Mistress Broomhead had not been a pleasant experience. Constance put it delicately even in her own mind, shied away from the memories. Mistress Broomhead was a thorough, exacting witch. She had standards and expected them to be met. Constance had had raw talent, plenty of it, but Mistress Broomhead had taught her discipline.

She had never created another notebook like that messy third-year specimen. All her notebooks at WTC were neat, immaculate, headings properly underlined, bullet points and diagrams. She had never again felt that wild swirl of ideas and dreams; she had never again blown up a cauldron in the midst of a fearless but poorly thought-out experiment. She thought at the time that she was growing up; on reflection, she wondered about that.

She had found the work and the exams at WTC stressful in a way she never had before. Everyone there was highly talented; top of the class was a spot one had to fight for. Mistress Broomhead had a way of exacting 100% from those chosen for her tutelage - more than 100%, against all mathematic possibility.

The damage she caused, to the mind and the self-esteem, were subtle: a creeping rot, Constance thought now; something you welcomed to begin with, because you felt it would make you a better witch, and ended up fearing. She left no marks: at least not any that were physical. After a dressing-down from Mistress Broomhead, one felt raw, as if the very soul had been stripped bare, scrutinised and found wanting. Constance blamed herself for the feeling, of course; perhaps all Mistress Broomhead's students did. It was all in her mind; she was far too sensitive; she was reading too much into a casual remark. She still felt afraid before every tutoring session, and damaged afterwards. She hardly noticed at the time how she came to eat less and less. No, that wasn't true: she was acutely aware of every nauseous pang. Whoever knew that anxiety, mere anxiety, could make one so ill? She remembered the months leading up to her final exams, at the end of her seventh year of training. She remembered the shaking, the tightness in her chest, the fighting for breath, the tremors in her muscles, the sleepless nights, the food she just couldn't keep down...she had thought she must have contracted some fatal illness. "Stress," the school nurse had said, "Make sure you rest and eat properly. Why don't you take a weekend off?" It was easy for her to say; the Broomhead method did not allow for weekends off. Constance worked right up until the exams, passed them, got her results, felt no pride or pleasure, then left Witch Training College and tried - so, so hard! - never to look back.

She had cut herself off from all that now. God willing, she need never see Heckitty Broomhead ever again. She did not go on to university or a life in academia as had been predicted. She severed all connection with her parents. She had had no friends by the time she left WTC - the Broomhead method did not really allow time for them - but if she had, she would not have stayed in touch. If only she could have cut herself off from the emotions, the memories, as well.

It had all made her the witch she was, of course: powerful, disciplined, dignified - and broken. "Confidence and control" was her mantra, but what did she really know of either? Her self-belief was a façade and could be undermined in a moment. She tried to pack her emotions away into a box, but they always came spilling back out again. Her anger was famous at the school, and she often thought guiltily of a wise old teacher who had once said to her that "those who shout have lost control."

And all this time, her...her _problem_ (she might as well admit it, just to herself) with food still persisted. When she took a bite, she still felt the choking and burning from the day her father had told her about the divorce. In times of stress, she still felt the stirring of the nausea from her WTC days, and was afraid in case she was descending into that awful illness again, the only cure for which seemed to be relaxation, something she was fairly sure she was incapable of. It sometimes took her over half an hour to consume a single apple. She usually read while eating in order to distract herself. She avoided eating with others, of course. She lived on vitamin supplements, Wide-Awake Potion, endless cups of tea, and sheer determination. If some of the girls did look up to her, as Amelia claimed, then they couldn't have picked a worse role model. She tried to teach them to be better than she was: just as powerful, but not so vulnerable.

She realised that the light was fading; she had lost track of the time she had spent out here in the forest, seething, hurting, remembering. She was sat on the blackened remains of the tree trunk she had blasted; she looked at her surroundings as if seeing them for the first time, as if she had, for a while, been somewhere else entirely. She should go back; it was Miss Bat's turn to supervise Lights-Out, which meant that she would have to go round again afterwards to check that the lights really were out, because the girls thought they could get away with anything if Miss Bat was in charge.

She would apologise to Amelia, of course; she realised she had been unreasonable. She would apologise in a way that made it clear she had no more desire to discuss the topic, and Amelia would pat her arm and say, "I am always here if you need to talk, dear", as she so often did. Constance had never yet felt the need - if she had, she had lacked the inclination.

Once, perhaps, she had longed for someone to save her. But, well, that sort of thing happened to other people, people who were just a little damaged in a pretty sort of way, not horrendously broken with jagged edges and beyond all hope of repair. No one was coming to save Constance Hardbroom. She would just keep limping on and doing her best to save everyone else from making the same mistakes, suffering the same pain, getting too close and being injured by her own agonies.

The thought was perhaps a grim one, but it energised her. She could never again be that bright, slapdash girl experimenting in the laboratory at The Oakbeam Witchcraft Academy; she could never again be the nine-year-old at the fairground whose world still made sense. But there were many things she could do just as she was, just managing day to day and making a difference where she could, and perhaps one day there would be a little piece of salvation for her - no, that was too much to hope. At least, if she herself had missed the path to happiness, she could nudge others in the right direction.

She dematerialised and reappeared at the foot of the main staircase, just in time to shout at Mildred Hubble for trailing about with her shoelaces undone again. She saw Amelia shortly afterwards; her apology was brief, not least because news came that a fight had broken out among the third years and she had to leave to break it up. The past was past; but there was life in Constance Hardbroom yet.

_Author's Note: This story was essentially written for cathartic purposes. I was just diagnosed (after 15 years) with ARFID, a little-known eating disorder that often gets mistaken for/misdiagnosed as anorexia. I wanted a way to work out my frustration, and I have always identified with how extremely uncomfortable HB looks whenever there is food involved: I think there is one episode (they are either at Cosie's, or Rowan-Webb's Riverside Retreat, I can't remember which) where she puts a scone up to her mouth and then just puts it down again, seemingly without biting it. Some of her feelings about food are based on my own, but her backstory is entirely fictionalised._


End file.
